Georgia Judge Marvin Arrington is accused of telling white lawyers to leave his courtroom and then lecturing young black defendants. He discusses his “mistake” in the video below.
Arrington does not deny separating white lawyers and black defendants to engage in some cathartic criticism. He told a local television station: “I came out and saw the defendants, about 99.9 percent Afro-Americans, and some point time I excused some of the lawyers, most of them white, and said to the young people in here ‘What in the world are you doing with your lives.'”
He further noted in ordering the lawyers out: “I didn’t think about racism or reverse racism, I practiced law for 30 years and 75 percent of my partners were white.”
Once again, whether ordering criminal defendants to court (here) or ordering prayer circle in court (here), judges seem to be increasingly forgetting their limits in creative sentencing or cathartic conduct. When you add a racial element, it becomes a particularly worrisome trend.
For the full story, click here.
UPDATE: Judge says ordering whites out was a “mistake.” Here.
For the video, click here.
Susan,
I suspect and hope that there are some processes operating that will tend to resolve this group’s distress about the effect Niblet, et al. is having on civil and reasoned discourse….
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Yeah mespo be mature. When he really gets on your nerves, just say
“I’m rubber you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks to YOU” 🙂
Jill:
You are probably right. I let annoyance overcome my good sense so I will open to one and all.
It would, indeed, be interesting to know what was said to these defendants by this judge.
Professor Michael Eric Dyson, author, of ‘Is Bill Cosby Right?’ is Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
“…A year ago,(2004) Bill Cosby set off a national debate in a speech to the NAACP where he criticized poor blacks in sometimes harsh language. Cosby emphasized personal responsibility, or the lack of it. In a new book, Michael Eric Dyson describes Cosby’s remarks as a vicious attack on the most vulnerable among us…”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/20/AR2006072001631.html
Hi mespo,
I don’t know the answer to this predicament. Niblet has been abusive towards you in his/her posts. I think that is ignorant and completely unacceptable behavior. You make well reasoned arguments in your posts and Niblet should answer in kind or not at all.
I also worry about excluding people (as in TASN). It doesn’t seem right to me. On the other hand, I didn’t get crapped on and that can certainly alter one’s perspective in a hurry!!!
Said with highest regard,
Jill
Susan:
I thought you were clear. I just wanted to reference you and Deeply since I have sworn off talking to niblet/neblet as adverse to my mental health. Sorry for any miscommunication on my part. No offense to Jill and JR I just forgot you were posting on this as well. From today, I will use the acronym “TASN” to express my communication “To All Save Niblet” in the future.
Susan & deeply:
While you might agree with the sentiment, there is no excuse for the Judge lecturing defendants without their lawyers present. He is the embodiment of legal and not parental or moral authority. The attorneys are there for a reason and that is to insure fairness in the process. The Judge has no right to lecture on his morality nor to assume that every one of the defendants is guilty as he obviously has by lecturing them on how they are ruining their lives.
******************
Mespo, I agree with you; my apologies if my previous post was written poorly and didn’t make that clear. I think what this judge did was darn close to judicial impropriety, if not directly crossing the line. I don’t think it’s a good idea for ANY judge to separate the defendants from their attorneys, for any reason, and I questioned why he separated them at all.
Again, my apologies for not making this clear before, but I thought I had. I’ll try to be more careful next time.
Michael:
I am glad you decided to post as well. I look forward to your thoughts and commentary. I have found that we do have some lively discussions and the audience is bright and involved. All in all, the group is respectful and very informed about current events. We do have our share of crazy old aunts but in truth all of us have been to the attic sometimes. Even our leading conservative posters can put a sentence together which, I would guess, makes our forum much better than a cabinet meeting of the current administration.
Thank you for the welcome. While I’ve been a follower of this site for a while I’ve hesitated to post. My experience with posting on other sites has been that the vituperation, trolls and attack mentality of those posting, makes the process unreadable and raises my blood pressure. Only recently have I begun to read the comment here, rather than just the original posts, and i have been pleasantly surprised by the level of discourse. I’ve also been a fan of Mr.Turley and his views on constitutional law.
As for deeply worried’s last post I couldn’t agree with it more and unfortunately wouldn’t have made the points so succinctly. I have been perplexed for years about this dichotomy between how the propaganda of certain corporate interests has taken such a hold among many who profess to believe in our country and its institutions.
mespo and Michael,
You both made excellent arguments here. You also drew together many disparate points whose connection aren’t immediately apparent, but do flow from this case.
Like Susan, I wonder what else this judge may have said. No matter his motivation he crossed a line.
Jill
Michael,
Niblet/neblet seems to be converted to the dominant view in rightwing cirles that Law is somehow good, but that the constituent parts of its administration are flawed.
Judges are activists and legislating from the bench. Lawyers are corrupt and seek only to bankrupt virtuous business interests. The people themselves are untrustworthy, dupable by the unscrupulous lawyers into awarding huge damages, and venal themselves in launching frivolous lawsuits.
So for more than thirty years, the US Chamber of Commerce, its litigation arm, the GOP representatives elected with financial support from the business sector, all have been painting this picture year after year after year. Working the refs so to speak. In judicial elections, they have been pouring money into the campaigns of business-friendly judges, and funding attack ads against judges who cross their interests.
Add to this witch’s brew, the disgruntled “values” folks with their dual hatred of the justice system and lawyers since the Brown v Board days, Miranda, Griswold and Roe and the numerous church/state separation cases, and we have a rather large section of people who feel as Niblet do.
Its strong enough that the trial attorney association saw it necessary to change their very professional name.
Welcome to MichaelSpindell,
From the post above, a very welcome voice to this salon.
Mespo and Michael,
I can’t argue with the presumption of guilt implied by the lecture–that is clearly error.
I was, quite simply, wrong.
Arrington said, “…some of the lawyers, most of them white.” From that I inferred lawyers of both colors were excluded and that it wasn’t Arrington’s wish to target white counsel, qua white, but to have alone time with the accused. But I may be being overgenerous.
My first instinct was to contrast a race-neutral counsel exclusion with the cell phone arrests and prayer circle formations we have read about and think, no big deal. But the point about presumption is too strong to argue against.
I withdraw my dissent and sign on to the majority opinion.
Judge Arrington no doubt was motivated by honest concern, but his actions were deplorable. First there was a presumption of guilt upon the defendants that may not be justified. The predominance of Afro-American defendants might well be due to bias in the enforcement of criminal justice, as is indicated in many studies. Nevertheless, whether in fact guilty or not, every defendant has the right of presumption of innocence as guaranteed by our legal system. Secondly, all defendants have a right to counsel to ensure that their rights are protected.
Arrington’s actions crossed the line of proper judicial conduct.
“niblet
Separating them from their attorneys was necessary because it is attorneys like them that are enabling bahavior such as this by demonstrating to them how easy it is to beat the system.”
Niblet if it were that easy to beat the system, then the US would not lead the world in the percentage of people in prison. In fact for the poor and for people of color our legal system is quite hard to beat. Unfortunately, there are far too many instances of the legal system getting it wrong.
From the tenor of your comment I would assume that you might be a proponent of a conservative point of view. If this is so then why are you a proponent of a belief that government is basically unable to act competently in our affairs (i.e. the legal system), except for law enforcement where the government always gets it right.
Susan & deeply:
While you might agree with the sentiment, there is no excuse for the Judge lecturing defendants without their lawyers present. He is the embodiment of legal and not parental or moral authority. The attorneys are there for a reason and that is to insure fairness in the process. The Judge has no right to lecture on his morality nor to assume that every one of the defendants is guilty as he obviously has by lecturing them on how they are ruining their lives. {See U.S. v. Jim Bakker for a classic case of the Judge overstepping his bounds on lecturing a criminal defendant. Bakker argued that the judge violated due process with his comments by factoring his own sense of religiosity and victimization into the sentence he imposed. The court of appeals agreed.)
Arrington’s contemptible method of excusing the Caucasian attorneys only serves to further Balkanize a southern court system just as segregated as when George Wallace grabbed the bullhorn a few miles away and expressed his racism for all the world to see. Does anyone think one lecture will do anything except make the Judge feel better after doing little to stem the root causes of crime like poverty, hopelessness, and family disintegration. As I said before, pointing the finger only boomerangs back to the accuser. What has Judge Arrington done except to soothe his conscience and make presumptions he cannot ethically make.
Separating them from their attorneys was necessary because it is attorneys like them that are enabling bahavior such as this by demonstrating to them how easy it is to beat the system.
DW, thanks; I was just about to ask what SCLC stood for, then I thought “read ahead first.” 🙂
As you said, that move of excusing the lawyers to lecture the defendants came pretty close to what some might call judicial impropriety. Doesn’t it say, in most of the Judicial Canons of Ethics for each state, that a judge must avoid even the APPEARANCE of impropriety? I know for a fact that’s one of the VA Canons of Ethics, and I doubt it’s any different for other states.
My concern is what else he might have said to these defendants while their lawyers were NOT present, that he didn’t mention to the press. I just have to wonder, why separate them at all, assuming these lawyers were the defendants’ legal counsel?
I agree with Neblet.
This was not a huge abuse of judicial authority, and might have done some good. If it had been all black lawyers, then the incident might not have provoked the reaction it did.
It is pretty close to the edge of the envelope however.
JR, thanks for the history. Thats one of the wonderful thing about this salon. For those not familiar with southern racial politics, the SCLC is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed in olden-days by the immortal Martin Luther King.
Sounds like a good old fashioned judge using his head. I am sure many if not all the defendents never had a father figure in their lives telling them what is right and what is wrong.
This does sound like a bad move on Arrington’s part.
Just to add for people not familiar with the Atlanta political scene, Arrington is somewhat of a legend in the city. He was one of the first two black students at Emory University Law School (along with Clarence Cooper, who also went on to become a judge in Georgia and presided over the famous evolution textbook sticker case in Cobb County), and served as the president of the Atlanta City Council from 1980 until losing the mayoral race to Shirley Franklin in ’97. He was appointed a state judge in 2002 by then-Governor Roy Barnes.
He’s been on the periphery of Georgia Democratic politics for the past decade and a half, and I’m guessing this probably pushes him a bit further out (though given the subject of his lecture to defendants, I wouldn’t be surprised if this boosted his chance of becoming the successor to Charles Kenzie Steele Jr. as the head of the SCLC (Steele was viewed at the time of his selection as more of a placeholder than the SCLC wanted, but the fracas caused by the search for a new leader had created some bad press that they wanted to get past).